Les Cours st-charles

Born in the vast railway lungs of Pointe-Saint-Charles, Building No. 5 and its old power plant still murmur beneath the peeling paint, their concrete skin shaped first by the Grand Trunk Railway in the late nineteenth century and rebuilt with new steel bones when Canadian National modernized the entire complex around 1927, and now the place exhales a slow, metallic breath as the control panels slump under layers of graffiti that pulse like improvised circuitry, the dials frozen in their final heartbeat while the spiral staircase curls upward in a rust-eaten coil, each step flaking like shed scales from a tired industrial creature; the halls below stretch in dim succession, pillars rising like the ribs of an enormous dormant machine, puddles trembling with the distant drip of forgotten pipes, and in the blue-tinted rooms the shadows cling to old stages and empty frames as if waiting for the echo of engines once repaired here, the whole complex steeped in a century of sweat, heat and locomotives, still clinging stubbornly to its industrial memory as time settles over it in soft dust and the abandoned workshops continue to breathe in the dark.